This disclosure relates generally to managing hierarchies of components and, more particularly, to using overriding references to replace sub-components within a hierarchy of components.
When designing and developing large integrated systems, circuits in particular, typically no one team of engineers is responsible for the entire design of the system. Instead, often teams of engineers are responsible for designs of components of the system, the overall design being the totality of the designs of the components provided by each team of engineers. As the system becomes more complex, more and more aspects of the system are divided into sub-components. A parent component may be broken up into multiple sub-components. This arrangement of components and sub-components may be related in a hierarchy that represents the overall system.
Some developers and designers may build reusable components that enable reductions in design and implementation times of a component hierarchy. Some hierarchy management systems use hierarchical references (“hrefs”) to link a component to a reusable component. As a component hierarchy becomes more complex, the probability of a conflict between reusable components increases. Such a conflict may be caused because, for example, the same reusable component is referenced by multiple components within a product, but they may reference different versions.